Recent proliferation of the Internet has made it common for users to access servers on the Internet or other networks from their own client systems and enjoy a wide variety of services provided thereby. For example, the services include the Internet search service. In the provision of the service, the user first inputs one or more execution parameters in the input form on the web page received from the server and transmits the information. The server executes a processing based on the received parameter(s) and provides the service to the user.
FIG. 7 shows an example of a browser window including an input form used for input of an execution parameter. A web page 720 shown in FIG. 7 provides an input interface of an Internet search service. A user who wants to use the Internet search service inputs, as an input parameter to the search engine, one or more search terms separated by a space in an input field 725 and transmits the search terms to the search server by pressing an execution button 730 labeled “Search”. The search server executes a search processing using the received search terms and returns a web page containing the search result to the user.
Many companies in the industry have been developing various techniques associated with the above description. The following patent documents and non-patent documents are examples of those techniques.
International Publication No. WO2002041185.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20070174350.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20070100809.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20080228468.
With the current techniques, an execution option in the text expression can be added to a parameter input in an input field. For example, for “Apache Lucene”, which is an open source software search engine, a search option can be specified for an input parameter according to the syntax shown in FIG. 8 (“Apache Lucene—Query Parser Syntax”, Peter Carlson, The Apache Software Foundation, http://lucene.apache.org/java/2—3—2/queryparsersyntax.pdf, last visited on Sep. 10, 2009).
However, the search option specification described above is inconvenient in that a user who wants to specify a search option has to memorize the specifications of the options or refer to the manual in order to input parameters. In addition, the syntax for specifying options may vary with individual tools (“Google search basics: More search help”, http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?h1=en&answer=136861, last visited on Sep. 10, 2009, for information on the syntax for the Google™ search engine, for example). Thus, a user of a plurality of types of tools may have to inconveniently memorize the respective syntaxes, for example.
Thus, an object of the present invention is to provide an improved method, system and program for supporting the input of an execution parameter of predetermined software to an input field.